Moss Def

Now if Bennett Cerf mentioned your name more than twenty times in his memoirs, that was a pretty accurate gauge of just how incredibly special you had to have been and while he never shrugged off one of his most celebrated publishees, Ayn Rand, her highness only garnered about half that page time. The V.I.P. I speak of is none other than legendary playwright Moss Hart (1904-1961). Although the name Moss Hart these days isn't bandied about quite as often as it was in Cerf's memoirs, Monsieur Hart was unquestionably a doyen of the theatrical world and come to think of it, could have learned Dorothy Kilgallen a thing or three about being the 'voice of Broadway, given his clout in that department.(Hey,what's with all my What's My Line in-jokes here)?

Ask Hart and he would have assured you he was born on  'the wrong end of Fifth Avenue,' which was more or less true - the native New Yorker was born to British-Jewish parents and  partly raised by his mother's sister Kate, a colorful character to say the least; obsessed with the theater, she would encourage her nephew's own lifelong love and allegiance to the art form. In fact, to say Hart lived and breathed for the medium would be undermining his unusual passion for the theater.

Ah, this will explain my WML references.

Before he shimmied (like his Auntie Kate) his way through the Great White Way, Hart was a garment factory worker that would later job the Borscht Belt circuit but these particular career opportunities proved fruitless for the budding playwright. He would steal away every moment possible to facilitate his play writing - he opted to write dramatic plays which ultimately were to the chagrin of the producers he shopped them to, the benefactors implored the talented writer to strictly pen comedy; as escapist fare was the call of the day.And appease the request Hart did, with a little help from friend George S. Kaufman and it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Their first work was astutely titled Once In A Lifetime. By the time Mr. Hart blew out the 25th candle, his would be a Cinderella story.

You Can't Take It With You became a wildly popular screwball comedy featuring Jean Arthur and directed by Capra in 1938

And recognize his name or not in the year 2014, Hart's productions would still ring a bell with most, whether it be The Man Who Came to Dinner,  the Depression-era dynamo -You Can't Take It With You, or Once in a Lifetime  (which Kaufman himself would star), a musical farce that brought the house own, night after night after night in 1930.

Moss put his Hart into directing also - Mr Harrison & Miss Andrews in My Fair Lady

And though Kaufman was considered his right-hand man, Hart would collaborate with other nabobs of contemporaneous theater, among them - Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Robbins and in the mid-1950's would go on to direct the Tony ensuing My Fair Lady and the subsequent Camelot in 1960. Consequently, Hart would compromise his health with his affinity for overworking , he suffered in silence the maladies of clinical depression and anxiety that he developed early on in childhood when a case of severe dermatitis would instigate an inferiority complex , causing both physical and emotional scars and would leave the artist self-conscious throughout his adult life, despite his pain, his emotional illness was never a liability and Hart would never fail to find the way to his quill, December 20,1961 was the night Moss Hart's light went out on Broadway, but never in our harts, he was 57.